


these tides, darling, cannot anchor you (but i wish they would)

by paperfairies



Category: Anne with an E (TV)
Genre: F/F, diana barry centric, kind of melancholy tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:20:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26434810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperfairies/pseuds/paperfairies
Summary: Diana goes to finishing school.
Relationships: Diana Barry/Anne Shirley
Comments: 8
Kudos: 26





	these tides, darling, cannot anchor you (but i wish they would)

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this purely as a coping mechanism, so i'm aware that it's very rambling and stylistic. please leave comments if you have the time; they mean a lot to me :) <3
> 
> warning: mentions of classicism (regarding diana + jerry), comp. het

It’s their last summer.

(Really, if everything goes as planned, it isn’t nearly their last summer, but it’s their last summer like this.)

“Diana,” Anne says quietly, her breath fanning warm air against the back of her neck, “Have I ever told you how much I adore your hair?”

“It’s like a raven’s nest. It isn’t nearly as romantic as you think it is.”

“No,” She threads another flower through her hair carefully. Her fingers are gentle, barely-there dancers tickling the crown of her head. “Your hair is rapturous. It looks like ocean waves. And there is so much of it! You could drown in it.” 

“So my hair is wild enough to suffocate someone?” 

Anne laughs carelessly and winds a dark ringlet around a flower stem. “Yes,” she continues, “I’m sure all of the boys will be itching to take a venturesome dive into your hair just so they can drown in it.” 

Diana catches their reflection in the Lake of Shining Waters, sees the two of them with purple lilies and saccharine blossoms decorating their heads. Both of Anne’s braids had come undone during a reenactment of Hamlet and Laertes’ duel, and Diana can see how far her hair has grown down her back, the way it curls at the ends. Anne fills her dress better than she did the summer before, or the one before that. Even sitting by the water, she can see where her waist dips into the dark green of her skirt. Anne is no longer a child. There is proof in what she sees in the water, in the men whose eyes follow Anne with unrecognized curiosity. These are things Diana isn’t supposed to notice, but she does. 

Anne ties off the final piece of her crown and sighs. “It is the bane of our friendship, your beauty. I hate that you have to leave me.”

“Don’t speak of such things, Anne,” she says cooly and turns toward her. “Nothing will change. We will always be together.”

It isn’t true, but it makes her eyes brighten and balms the malignant ache in her chest. They can pretend like children, play at a story without beaus and expectations. It’s more fantastical than all of their stories about fairies and dragons and knights, but out of all their shared compositions, Diana likes it best. 

She sees it before Anne does.

He follows her with his eyes, tracing the movement of her hand as it slides across the parchment. There’s an intensity to Gilbert’s gaze, one that goes beyond vague attraction or admiration for her pretty face and thick braids. It seems like something tender and private, like something Diana shouldn’t be allowed to see. 

She focuses on her geometry quiz. It scares her -- to think of Anne entangling herself with a boy and pursuing a great, bright future with him while Diana is shipped to Paris to learn how to smile and curtsy. She’ll come home in two years, and Anne will surely be traveling the world or in the midst of inventing something wonderful with Gilbert Blythe, and all Diana will be able to do is show off etiquette manners and silk gloves and evening gowns. 

Anne catches Gilbert’s eye and smiles briefly, the dimple in her cheek popping out. Color rises in Gilbert’s face, but she doesn’t seem to notice, continuing to practice her signature on the backside of her exam. 

If she doesn’t notice it, nothing may ever come to fruition. Nothing may ever happen. But Anne is the least naive person that she knows, never content with not knowing something, always trying to read between the lines and comprehend the spilled ink in the margins. Gilbert’s hand is dripping incriminating, indelible red, and it’s only a matter of time. 

Winter comes. Jerry is a respite from the cold, if anything.

Anne is gone more and more often -- interviewing people for the school newspaper, holed up in her bedroom studying new material for the Queen’s exams. She doesn’t say anything about not having enough time for games or long walks or needing to focus, but Diana doesn’t want to bother her, not when she’s preoccupied with preparing for what’s next. Instead, she spends her time in the barn at Green Gables, where Anne leaves pieces of herself behind in the English alphabet carved into the dirt or the long, red hairs scattered in the penn. 

Reasonably, she should be using this time to prepare for her own future, but Paris seems so distant, so far away. She rationalizes that she is preparing, in a way, by practicing her nearly perfect French with Jerry while he’s on his breaks, but that argument is somewhat negated by the fact that they’re always huddled together in an old barn attic with unsympathetic pieces of hay stabbing into their clothing, and Jerry’s clipped, Acadian dialect would hardly be appreciated across the ocean. 

“On Christmas, _maman_ makes a pie with,” Jerry sighs and tries to gesticulate something, but she only frowns. “Um, pomme de pré.” 

“ _Pomme de pré?_ ” Diana repeats. 

“Anne tells me you are very smart, fluent in French, going to Paris soon, and you do not hear of _pomme de pré?_ ”

Diana grins and reaches to flick his tweed hat but retracts her hand. She isn’t doing anything wrong, but something about this, something about sitting and watching him shave off bits of his apple (his _lunch_ ) with a pocketknife, feels like she’s breaking a rule. She readjusts her skirt and tucks it underneath her legs. “I _am_ fluent in French.” 

“Ah, yes, of course, but you are not fluent in my French,” he concedes, wiping his calloused, sun-soaked hands against his trousers. He smiles mirthlessly. “You do not know the dirty, ugly, Acadian French.” 

“That isn’t true.”

“I know. But it is what you rich people think.”

She contemplates quietly for a moment as Jerry chews his apple in silence. Carefully, she extends her hand and lets it fall over his, still sticky with sugar and dusted with dirt. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” he responds without looking at her, but his hand trembles underneath hers. 

“ _Pomme de pré._ Apple of meadow. Will you tell me what it means?”

His calloused index finger falls over her smooth, white pinky. “Alright.” 

Her mother schedules a dress fitting for her, and she is squeezed and measured and laced and relaced until she is a European aristocrat ready to be courted off to the highest bidder.

The dress itself is beautiful, inspired by Jacques Doucet’s work and shipped from a shop in Bordeaux. The underlayer is lined with thin ribbons of metallic fiber, and the surface is made of sheer white material printed with blue roses. But the girl in the mirror looks foolish, like a child stuffed into a woman’s clothing. She looks like a porcelain doll, not the bride of adventure and knowledge she claims to be when she speaks furtively to Anne in the woods. Her mother beams beside her.

“You will do so well, my dear,” she tells her and nuzzles into her in a way she hasn’t done since Diana was a baby. “I love you. You are my pride.” 

Her chest clenches as she stares into the mirror -- at her rosy lips and shiny curls that fall over the delicate frills on her dress. “Like ocean waves,” Anne had told her just last summer, when pretending was easier, when the days were less sparse. “To drown in,” she had said teasingly. Diana thinks of men drowning in her long hair and docile manners and silk skirts, and it feels like pin pricks being stabbed into her side. The girl in the mirror is all that she will ever be loved for. Not her mind or her spirit. Only the stupid, foolish, pretty girl smiling back at her mother in the glass. 

Moody begins to sink. 

“Your dress is very blue,” he manages weakly and worries his bottom lip between his teeth. He extends his hands to her helplessly. “I like it.”

 _Diana’s hair smells like roses,_ the writing on the Take Notice Board reads.

She should be happy. She should be flattered. 

She watches Anne study. 

“I want you to have these rings, darling,” Aunt Josephine says, pressing cold metal and jewels into her palm. “They are lovely, but I’m afraid I hardly get out as much as I used to.”

One of the rings is small, a black hematite crystal on a thin silver band. It’s strangely matte, not throwing off reflections or glimmers in the broad daylight. She holds it between her fingers gently. “Anne has always liked odd things.” 

“Will you give this to Anne? When she wakes up? I’m needed at home for Minnie May’s violin lesson, but I wanted to bring it here first.”

A small smile pulls at Jerry’s cheeks as he takes the ring, and there is something terrible about the earnest yearning, the glitter of something like hope in the corners of his mouth. “You are so kind, Diana. _Une belle et gentille chérie_.” 

Inexplicable guilt twinges at her as she leaves Green Gables, Jerry’s eyes lingering on her retreating form. She decides to let him go before it’s too late. 

Anne and Gilbert are extensions of each other, like long lost limbs finally reunited as they hold hands and twirl together during dance rehearsal. He is dreamier and bolder than ever, and Anne is beautiful and confident, and they work together too well. It is what Diana had always expected, even before they were amicable. Gilbert stares at her, except it’s hardly a stare, more like his eyes are meeting something reverent, memorizing her face as if he can make the image linger like burnt sugar stuck to his teeth. She wonders if Anne can see the ink now. 

The frost melts, and the days become longer. She walks home alone on Fridays, while Anne stays behind at school and studies with the rest of the class for another two hours. Gilbert, however, seems to work on his own schedule and visits before supper every week. He’s only there for farming business and nothing more, but one night her father insists that he stay for supper, and he reluctantly agrees. While Mary Lou arranges another place setting for him, her mother sends Diana to the parlor to entertain him. 

Her shoes have barely made a sound against the tile when he turns away from the heavy drapery and shakes both of her hands.

“Good to see you again, Diana,” he smiles. She feels her own drop as she studies where their hands have joined.

He’s wearing Anne’s black ring. 

Between the dancing, the mocking ring on Gilbert’s pinky, and Anne lamenting about him for an hour in her bedroom, she neglects to throw a lifevest out to Jerry. Jerry goes under, and she lets him.

She presses her lips to his in the shade of a striped tent, her smooth, gloved hand pressed into his. It’s foreign and strange, but then she closes her eyes, feels his lips, soft and pliant and feminine against her own, and her heart suddenly feels lightweight, giddy, jumping into her throat. She pulls away quickly, and he looks at her like she is the sun, like he would allow himself to melt and wither away just to stay in her orbit. 

It is wrong, unnatural for him to love something so much, something that, unknowingly or not, will hurt him. Diana knows this, knows something that he does not, and yet she does not tell him. 

To him, she isn’t the girl in the mirror. She’s something else, the polar opposite of what everyone else wants, someone who will dance and skip with him without propriety and sound out unfamiliar French phrases while she tarnishes her skirt with sludge and manure. This can only end poorly, but she lets it happen. There is something comforting about knowing that she would be disowned and thrown out if word ever reached her parents about what their porcelain doll has been doing with a boy content to work on a farm for the rest of his life. There is something reassuring about the certainty of their doom. 

The make-believe games begin again. This is romance, according to Anne’s stories: the secrecy, the rush of adrenaline, the rebellion, the French flattery. She embroiders pieces of linen in the sitting room with phrases that she’s learned from him, daydreams about an impossible future with a boy with a stupid, hopeful heart, and does her best to make it mean something, but it’s harder to fall into this role than it was to play Shakespeare with Anne. It’s careful preparations and deliberate gifts, whereas it was second nature and impromptu declarations of adoration with her. The pretending was still pretending, but it was different, better, with her.

“I simply cannot condone this confusion. The exams are on the horizon, Diana, and he is keeping my attention away from my studies.” 

“It’ll be alright, Anne,” she reassures her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Gilbert is an idiot if he doesn’t love you.” 

Her brow crumples, and she rocks forward, her head in her hands. Her hair falls over her like a red curtain, and Diana pulls a loose lock out of her face and tucks it behind her ear. 

“I am loved,” Anne sighs, “I know that. But I don’t think that anyone will love me in that way. I’ve resigned myself to that.”

The words spring into her throat. She wants to say it -- the way she’s said it so many times before when they reenacted great works on hilltops or said goodbye at crossroads. The syllables bubble up inside of her like champagne, but all of a sudden her throat feels raw and sore, and her mouth is dry.

“Anne, you’re tired. Let me braid your hair, and then we’ll go to bed. Alright?” she says gently.

“Alright.”

Three years ago, a memory:

“I would live with you forever if I could.”

“Anne? Are you awake?”

Anne only breathes against the pillows. She is long gone, and only the moon, bright and buttery and waxing, can see her. 

She leans in close, presses her face close to Anne’s hair, drowning in it. “Anne, I have to tell you something.”

Anne sighs, still sleeping, still unhearing.

“I love you.” 

She takes the entrance exams in a burst of adrenaline and recklessness. 

_Pointless, pointless, pointless._ They will never let you go, she thinks as she stares down a poorly-worded historical prompt about Nova Scotia. You are theirs. 

_Anne is from Nova Scotia,_ she ponders blithely and begins to write. 

“I don’t think that we should continue seeing each other.”

Her skirt is always soiled, and there is always a streak of dirt across his cheek. He is halfway through eating an apple. 

“I never was good enough for you.”

“No,” she says, desperately grappling for honesty but only coming up with half-truths and tangled knots. “It’s… it’s different.”

“Different,” Jerry repeats. “Okay.”

He shifts from foot to foot, waiting.

“Here,” she interjects awkwardly, pulling out two hairbows and a messy handful of coins from her basket. It seems stupid now, compensating him with her money, with the material thing that separates them. He takes them wordlessly. “The bows are for your sisters. They said they liked my ribbons. I can send more once I’m in Paris.” Jerry’s frown only deepens, creasing the tanned skin between his eyebrows, and she plunges on bravely, “And the money is so that you can write to Anne while she’s at Queens. You told me that you make each other cards for birthdays and holidays, and she appreciates them a lot. More than you know.” 

“You remember,” he says slowly.

Of course she remembers. She remembers everything about Anne.

His eyes roam over her face, beginning at the crown of her head, reaching the end of her chin, then traveling up to and stopping at her eyes. 

She knows, she knows, she knows, and she wishes he wouldn’t. He does.

_“Je t’aime.”_

She leaves him to his work. 

She passes the exam, surpasses her classmates that studied for months -- and she isn’t allowed to go.

She drips pretty, transparent tears onto her pillow, and Anne kneels at her bedside and cradles her hands, as if she is horribly sick and dying. Melodramatically, she feels like she is. She thought that she had thrown hope away long ago, and it had worked in her favor -- worked well enough so that she doesn’t feel the weight of terrible sadness or violent crushes of emotion the way Anne does. But now her future is set in stone. There are no more games left to play, no more pretending. Her life was always held in balance by little lies, and as artificial as they were, she had loved them, held them close inside of her lungs and veins. There was love, and now there is grief.

“We can find another way, Diana. Don’t worry,” Anne whispers fervently, her brow set. “I can try to convince your parents, or--or we can ask Aunt Jo to speak with them--”

“No,” she shakes her head into the sheets. “I can’t. I’m not brave.”

Anne squeezes her hand almost brutally. “We are not finished. We’re meant to be together, Diana. This, us, our story. It won’t end like this,” her voice quivers, and Diana turns to see the messy tears falling down Anne’s face. Anne sobs raggedly, presses her smooth forehead against Diana’s palm. “Don’t leave. I need you. Don’t leave. I need you with me.” 

Looking back, she wonders what would’ve happened if she had told her there. If she had choked it out in her frazzled, bleary state and forced the words into the cold, stale air. Or if she had tipped the red head just slightly and done what she used to do with Jerry, when she’d squeeze her eyes closed and imagine someone else. 

Her lips do nothing. She says nothing, does nothing, and lets Anne’s tears run rivulets between her fingers. 

_Dear Anne,_  
_I am happy to hear about Gilbert. I’m glad that you are friends again. You two certainly are an interesting pair. I wish that I could--_

_Dear Anne,_  
_The girls think that I’ve made quite an impression after decorating my chiffon dress with roses and lilies. My satin sashes aren’t nearly as lovely as theirs, and I hoped that I could--_

She obediently writes to her father about the men she meets in Paris so that he can do his research, report to her which suitors are the most advantageous to pursue. She plays the same tricks: saccarchine eyes, clever words with no real, solid meaning, playful but not too playful, classy and elegant without seeming pretentious. They are stupid, rich young boys that have never needed strategy or charm or caution and go under the tide easily. 

They drown, as seen by the thick bundle of letters delivered to her on a weekly basis, the flowers that miraculously arrive at her doorstep, the volume of dance proposals. They shower her with gifts and praise and offers of love, and yet she only starts hopefully when the mail is delivered, wondering if Anne has written her back yet. 

Fred Wright takes her to see an opera from velvet-lined box seats. 

“I have heard you play the piano. That is why I brought you here,” he says to her softly during intermission. His voice is gentle, featherlight, but there is an edge of nervousness to his tone. “I would like to hear you play again.” 

“I don’t see a piano in the orchestra pit.” 

Fred flushes but recovers quickly. “I have a piano in my parlour.”

When he smiles, the dimple in his cheek pops out -- just like Anne’s. 

Tremulous, demure notes from the string section, divisi among the violins. Delilah approaches Samson in her thick, magenta robes, and he sinks to his knees.

>   
>  Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix  
>  Comme s'ouvrent les fleurs  
>  aux baisers de l'aurore  
> 

Translation: My heart opens to your voice like the flowers open to the kisses of dawn.

She returns to Avonlea two summers later, when the clouds still cling to the sky through primitive rays of sunshine. She doesn’t go to her parents first; she goes to Green Gables. 

She feels out of place with her violet silks and lace sleeves, but the locket dangling from her neck grounds her, reminding her that this farming town is still her home. 

Through a slightly grimy window, she can see Anne twirling her finger through the soapy water in the pot that she’s washing. Her hair is loosely gathered in a thick bun at the top of her head, and she has a blank, unfocused look on her face, as if she’s lost herself in an elaborate daydream or idea. Diana carefully makes her way through the dirt path and knocks on the window uncertainly. 

Anne jerks away from the sink, and the listless look on her face is wiped away. 

They collide in the doorway, in a cluster of sharp limbs and hard angles that are almost bruising. But while the rest of Anne’s embrace is nearly violent, her hands are gentle, smoothing over Diana’s hair repeatedly in long, careful motions. It feels like being sixteen and basking in the summer’s warmth by the Lake of Shining Waters and scrapping together a future together out of wisps of dreams and hope. It feels the way it used to. The way it was supposed to. 

Anne’s tears soak into the fabric of her dress, her fingers still weaving invisible flowers through her hair. “We will always be together. It will be the two of us, always.” 

Diana holds on tighter and winds her hands around Anne’s waist. Always, always, always -- like a litany. 

(Truth be told, it _is_ their last summer. There is an engagement ring around her finger that Anne cannot see, and she moves permanently to England in two months.) 

“When you grow up, my love, you will do anything that you want,” she whispers to the soft head resting against her chest. The English countryside peeks in through the muslin curtains, casting uneven pockets of light through the bedroom and across her daughter’s hair. 

“Anything?”

“Anything,” Diana replies, “Anything, my Anne Cordelia.”


End file.
